Seeing that it is far more powerful/efficient than current weaponized usage of atoms, would anyone ever feel the need to make an anti-matter bomb?
Would the explosion be shaped like a nuclear blast? I assume so given that all sufficiently large explosions produce mushroom clouds in the atmosphere. Would it be ‘clean’? Again, I assume so, given that the radiological fallout from nuclear blasts is pretty much the same principle as a dirty bomb (throwing already radioactive materials far and wide).
But will anyone ever make one, and what use would it be? I mean an originally designed 100MT Tsar Bomb is already pretty much the practical limit on explosion size due to the curvature/size of the earth, right? Maybe it could be easier to deliver due to being smaller? I guess that would depend on the size of the containment field more than any actual anti-matter.
What practical constraints would there be in making one? I know right now we’re producing anti-matter very slowly due to the cost, but the same was once true of practical uranium and all plutonium. How long would it take to gather enough (say 1g) anti-matter? What problems in containment might there be? Would it be delivered by existing missiles, or might a new form be more effective? Is it even actually possible with what we have now, regardless of cost and time issues?
I think it might be interesting to build and test one just because we can. Wouldn’t have fallout concerns I think, so pollution wouldn’t be an issue. Who knows, maybe we’ll learn something from it? But then I also said the same about Cold War proposals to nuke the moon >_>
I think it’s always going to be harder to make than enriched uranium, because it doesn’t exist, so when making it you have to produce a) the energy contained in the antimatter b) efficiency losses. To make say a 100 megaton bomb you need maybe 1000 megatons of energy, while for uranium you only have to mine and refine it - which requires less energy than the uranium contains, otherwise atomic energy wouldn’t be possible.
Oh and the main problem with containment is: charged antimatter, which can be contained without “touching” it, repels itself, so you can’t have a lot at the same time. Neutral antimatter (e.g. antihydrogen), can’t be contained without coming into contact with normal matter.
At current peak production rates… Roughly 80 billion years. (Right now, we can manage about 15 million antiprotons per minute (from here), which, assuming we run things nonstop and produce antihydrogen at 100% effectiveness, means it takes 76.38 billion years to accumulate the 6.022*10[sup]23[/sup] antiprotons necessary.)
This one gram antimatter, assuming you manage to completely annihilate with one gram of matter, will give a yield of ~40kt TNT (2g have an energy equivalent of ~1.8*10[sup]14[/sup]J, and 1kT TNT ~4.184*10[sup]12[/sup]J – or more directly), so to rival the Tsar Bomba, you’ll need about 2.5 kg of the stuff.
Meaning we’re gonna need some major technical breakthroughs before we can even consider bombing us all to hell this way – and since we already have plenty of ways to do that, I don’t think this is going to become feasible in the foreseeable future.
Wow. I knew production was slow, I didn’t know it was that slow.
I’ve heard that in space matter and anti-matter can ‘appear’ out of the vacuum, and usually annihilate each other as soon as they come into existence, but that near black holes, or strong gravitational/magnetic fields such as exist throughout the Jovian system, the process can sometimes be interrupted leaving anti-matter in space. Is this true, and if so, is there anywhere we can actually ‘mine’ anti-matter?
And yeah Aaron, I know it’s not economical. When I was talking in terms of efficiency I meant in terms of the end product. I didn’t know it repels itself though. How would one contain a gram or more of anti-matter then?
I am not able to crunch Half Man Half Wit’s cites but pretty sure I have seen numbers that, while huge, were nowhere near billions of years.
I once read that a gram of antimatter could orbit the Space Shuttle. I also thought I heard if we increased production a thousand-fold from today’s levels it’d take several hundred years to produce it.
So, a long time and enough to be totally worthless but not billions of years.
I also though I saw that antimatter currently would cost about $60 billion/gram to produce making it economically totally out of reach for any use.
I have no doubt if we somehow learn to produce antimatter in some mass produced way it’ll be used as a weapon. A gram could level a skyscraper and more. Not a lot more could level a city. The biggest thing keeping people from carrying even a gram of it around is the magnetic containment chamber you need to carry it around. That’d be a fair bit bigger and heavier.
I thought I recently read that the latest advancements we have said the LHC could hold antimatter for about 45 minutes (and that is just a few atoms…the more you have the harder it gets and a gram is many millions/billions of atoms).
Although, despite its terrible possibilities as a weapon I think the only way humans can explore the galaxy will require antimatter as a fuel. Even then it’d be difficult. That or we need to discover hyperspace or something but traveling through normal space we’ll need antimatter to get anywhere in anything remotely approaching human timescales.
Orbiting the Space Shuttle wouldn’t work, since the Shuttle is inside the Earth’s Roche limit. If you tried to get something orbiting the Shuttle, it’d end up just orbiting the Earth separately, in a Shuttle-like orbit. That said, though, orbiting the Earth (or orbiting some other satellite outside of the Roche limit) should work just fine.
I think Chronos is just being facetious. What I’d love to know is this: if all the energy released by one Tsar Bomba (5.4 yottawatts) could be converted to thrust, how fast would it make the Shuttle Orbitor (78,018 kg.) go if you started from a dead stall away from any gravitational influences? (Yes, I know there are at least two or three things scientifically ‘sloppy’ about that sentence, but you get the general gist of what I’m trying to ask.)
OK, I’m trying to answer my own question with the help of wiki. All I have to do is convert 5.4 X 10E24 watts to Newtons, divide by 78,018, and the result will be the speed in meters/second, right? As you can easily see, I really need to brush up on basic physics.
No, not facetious, I just misunderstood the post. I thought Whack was saying that you could store antimatter by putting it into orbit around the Shuttle (hence not need to have it contact anything else).
Quoth Washoe:
Yes, you do need to brush up. First of all, Watts aren’t a measure of energy, but of power: You can get a whole lotta Watts with a small amount of energy, just by releasing that energy really, really fast. Second, you can’t convert Watts to Newtons, since they measure different things: Watts are power, while Newtons are force. Third, even if you had the force, dividing that by the mass of the Shuttle would give you an acceleration, not a speed: What speed you would get to would depend on how long that acceleration was maintained.
Crap. So how ‘bout giving a poor Armenian boy a hint, then? I have a freshman trig-based physics text lying around—I’ll work out the answer myself, even if it takes a couple of weeks. Just give me a prod in the right direction.
Wikipedia tells me that the Tsar Bomba had a yield of 50 megatons. Convert this into joules, then use K.E. = ½mv[sup]2[/sup] to find v in units of ms[sup]-1[/sup]
The real use for a small amount of antimatter wouldn’t be as a weapon itself, but rather as a sort of “match head” in a pure-fusion bomb.
In other words, the matter/antimatter reaction would be used to start a larger fusion reaction, without the need for the fission trigger (which is where the majority of the fallout comes from)
To initiate fusion you need to squish stuff to astounding pressures and temperatures and that needs an explosion around the hydrogen that squishes equally from all sides.
That is why a fission bomb is wrapped around a fusion bomb to make the fusion work.
Seems to me if you wanted to do it with antimatter you still have to wrap the fusion material with antimatter and make the antimatter go off in a very precise process to squish the hydrogen and initiate fusion. (And the equipment to keep the antimatter isolated in that configuration I would guess would make your bomb far lager and more complex than anything we have today).
In short I doubt anyone would bother even if they could do it.
Seems to me by the time you have gone to all that trouble you are probably better off just carrying some antimatter around and then letting that detonate.
Might not be quite as big of a bang but a helluva lot simpler.
Per this source, the Tsar Bomba released 2.1 X 10[sup]17[/sup] joules of energy.
v = √(2.1 X 10[sup]17[/sup]/39009) m/s = 2320.21 km/s = 1441.71 miles per second = .007739 c.
2.1 X 10[sup]17[/sup] joules is roughly 1/6.71 of the energy released by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. So to accelerate an empty Orbitor to 50% of the speed of light (where the Lorentz factor is approximately 1.15) would require an amount of energy roughly equal to a magnitude 10 earthquake.
Give me a 50 million dollar research grant and I will guarantee to reduce that time to 40 billion years! And only 10 billion working three shifts and weekends.
Sorry, no refunds if the sun burns out before the 10 billion years goes by.
My numbers are accurate as of the CERN document I cite from last year. Things may have changed since then, but I doubt it’d be that much. What you may have seen is an extrapolation based on the current increase of our capacity to manufacture antimatter, but I don’t think such numbers are meaningful – we’re way too early in our antimatter-production capable period to allow good guesses on that part, I think. That we increased our yield a millionfold (or whatever) in the past ten years does not mean that we’ll increase it by another millionfold in the next ten years (though it’s not impossible that it happens).
My research into the subject, which has had to duck around a lot of STar Trek references, suggests that
An antimatter bomb would not leave behind directly caused nuclear fallout, but
It may immediately spray a lot of gamma radiation.
It is by any definition a weapon of mass destruction - one pound of antimatter would blow up a large city - so I don’t think anyone would be really impressed by your claim that “hey, at least it wasn’t a nuclear weapon!”
So how ‘bout giving a poor Armenian boy a hint, then? 
I have a freshman trig-based physics text lying around—I’ll work out the answer myself, even if it takes a couple of weeks. Just give me a prod in the right direction.